Le Jardin des Tuileries et le pavillon de Flore, gelée blanche is one of fourteen canvases depicting views of the Louvre and its associated gardens which Camille Pissarro painted during a six-month period from November 1899 to May 1900. This "Second Series," as the artist called it, revisited many of the same views as the first group of fourteen canvases (see fig. 1) and is distinguished in part by a heightened acuity of line and cooler light.
Pissarro’s series paintings of Paris in the late 1890s and early 1900s are among the supreme achievements of Impressionism, taking their place alongside Claude Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral, poplars and haystacks (see fig. 2) and the late waterlilies. For an artist who throughout his earlier career was primarily celebrated as a painter of rural life rather than the urban environment, Pissarro’s Paris series featuring the landmarks of the Boulevard Montmartre, Gare Saint-Lazare, La Place du Théâtre and Jardin des Tuileries confirmed his position as the preeminent painter of the city (see fig. 3).
The enigma of Paris takes its shape through motif, light, color and paint handling in different guises for each of the Impressionist artists. For Pissarro “the Louvre becomes Paris, its towers, façades and courtyard literally filling the picture,” Rick Brettell writes. “The… painter’s pictorial fascination with the Louvre might be interpreted as a realization of the lasting importance of great art. Indeed we must remember that Pissarro studiously omitted the most conspicuous monument of modern Paris—the Eiffel Tower—from his city, and that he also avoided her second greatest symbol, Notre-Dame de Paris. For Pissarro, the Louvre, in rain and snow, at dawn, in autumn and winter, became the center of what might be called his ‘series’ of series” (Exh. Cat. Dallas Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art and London, Royal Academy of Arts, The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings, London, 1993, p. xxxv).
In the winter of 1898, Pissarro decided to rent an apartment in Paris rather than taking hotel rooms as he had done during his previous visits to the capital. Pissarro now made his stay in Paris more permanent so that he could devote his t.mes to studying and painting the incomparable cityscape. From his letter to his son Lucien dated December 4, 1898, we can sense the excit.mes nt Pissarro must have felt as he describes the view from his window:
"We have engaged an apartment at 204 rue de Rivoli, facing the Tuileries, with a superb view of the Garden, the Louvre to the left, in the background the houses on the quais behind the trees, to the right the Dôme des Invalides, the steeples of Ste. Clothilde behind the solid mass of chestnut trees. It is very beautiful. I shall paint a fine series" (Camille Pissarro quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, Pissarro, 1980, p. 146).
Being settled in an apartment, rather than frequently moving between short-term accommodations, allowed Pissarro to spend more t.mes working on a particular series of paintings, and to meditate and experiment with the subject matter. This resulted in a great variation within the series, as the artist was able to observe and depict his subject in different weather conditions, and in different seasons and t.mes s of day. Moving from one window to the next, he studied the dynamic urban landscape from three slightly different vantage points, all portrayed in his series of the Tuileries: a frontal view, showing the Bassins des Tuileries, a view of the Louvre's Pavillon de Flore and the southern Denon wing in the background and, moving eastwards, a view of the Pavillon de Marsan to the left, with Jardin du Carrousel in the center and the Denon wing in the distance.
Pissarro's 'Second Series' of Le Jardin des Tuileries: The Museum Context
Pleased with his previous accommodations, Pissarro would rent the same rooms months later beginning in November 1899. Among the canvases that Pissarro painted of the Tuileries Gardens, Le Jardin des Tuileries et le pavillon de Flore, gelée blanche is the only composition to feature frosty atmospheric conditions. In Katherine Rothkopf’s essay on Pissarro’s winter scenes she highlights the rarity of the frost scenes in the Tuileries garden views: “Pissarro produced twenty-eight paintings in his Tuileries series, fourteen in 1899 and fourteen in 1900…. He produced four works that include winter precipitation, three paintings with snow, and one with frost. His snowscapes from this series feature views of the Tuileries with the Louvre beyond, providing a new contract between the nature of the gardens and the architecture of the buildings” (Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Phillips collects ion, Impressionists in Winter. Effets de Neige, 1998-99).
The artist’s masterful handling of his medium in Le Jardin des Tuileries et le pavillon de Flore, gelée blanche is reflected in each nuanced brush stroke. The gentle touch of frost reflects the colorful pink and blue light highlights in the sky as the cool light of early winter descends upon the buildings in the distance. Atop the Pavillon de Flore, which sits at the end of the Denon wing of the Louvre, flies the French tricolor; in the distance across the River Seine is the left bank and the building that line the Quai d’Orsay. Rarely seen in public, the present work comes to auction for the first t.mes
in more than forty years.